subject is conscious, makes modesty immediately desirable and the absence of it vicious. Gautier, in this respect, is the most eloquent of our modern Athenians, and pays scantiest tribute to our English scruples. Flesh and blood, noses and bosoms, arms and legs were a delight to him, and it was his mission to dilate upon them. For any one who has glanced at the dusky background of Parisian life, with its sallow tones and close odours, among which no Athenian sky makes a blue repoussoir either for statues or mortals, there is something almost touchingly heroic in Gautier's fixed conception of sublime good looks. He invents unprecedented attributes, and it is nothing to say of his people that they are too good to live. In "Une Nuit de Cléopâtre," the hero, inflamed with a hopeless passion for the Egyptian queen, has been pursuing her barge in a little skiff, and rowing so fast, under an Egyptian sun, that he has overtaken her fifty oarsmen. "He was a beautiful young man of twenty, with hair so black that it seemed blue, a skin blond as gold, and proportions so perfect that he might have been taken for a bronze of Lysippus. Although he had been rowing some time, he betrayed no fatigue, and had not on his brow a single drop of sweat." Gautier's heroines are always endowed with transparent finger tips. These, however, are his idler
